Dirty Secrets (8 page)

CHAPTER

Much to her surprise, Zoey actually managed to focus throughout the afternoon. She spent a little bit of time focusing down and tightening up the questions she wanted to ask Alex. It occurred to her that he might be being so sexy just to try and divert her from whatever was going on at the company, but the urgency in his tone when he
’d asked her what it was that she knew—she didn’t think so. Her instinct was, quite simply, that he was concerned about the company, and needed to get more information, however he could. In a funny way, she might feel like the only person that he could trust.

She did some work on a couple of freelance pieces, silly web content and white papers that she could dash off without too much time or effort, and then took a shower. She reeked of sex and sweat, and while there was a certain appeal to meeting him smelling like what he’d done to her, it wasn’t her first choice. So, a shower. She washed her hair, blow dried it out, and styled it simply, a few small braids done in the front sections of her hair, then pinned back under her crown so that they held the rest of her hair back and out of her face. She kept her makeup light, and dressed in a pair of black pants, a deep blue sweater that set off her eyes, and a necklace that she’d gotten from her grandmother, a single pearl trapped in a gold cage. She normally didn’t wear gold; her skin was too pale, and the tone of the metal made her complexion look sallow, but it was her grandmother’s. Exceptions could be made in special circumstances. A pair of black clogs, and a vintage wool peacoat she’d picked up at a thrift store a few months back to ward off the autumn chill. She hadn’t needed it during the day, but once the sun went down, the city could get brisk quickly.

She made sure her tablet and her laptop were in her big leather bag, and then she set off. She had plenty of time to get across town on the subway, which was a godsend; her budget allowed for either taxis or meals, but usually not both in a week.

Zoey had hoped to beat Alex to the restaurant, but when she walked in the door, he’d already been seated. The hostess gave her a second glance when she said she was meeting a friend; Alex was the only diner currently seated.

He watched her every step as she crossed the floor. She liked to think of herself as a modern woman who did not rely on the male gaze to establish her self esteem, but it would have been a flat out lie to pretend she didn’t put a little extra shimmy in her walk, just to see his eyes focus on her hips, and then force themselves back up to her face.

“Hi there,” she said, shrugging off her peacoat and hanging it on the back of her chair. He’d changed, too. He wore dark blue jeans, and a sweater in a shade of autumnal gold that she never would have pulled off, but that made his eyes look even deeper and more luscious. “Nice to see you again.”

He just watched her for a moment, his chin resting in his hand, one finger tracing his lower lip. It was a mesmerizing motion, and she tried not to be enraptured. This restaurant was priced well out of her means, but they still didn’t look like the sort of place that would tolerate her crawling across the table, climbing into his lap, and begging him to do her right there.

The memory of Alex’s face last night, behind the mask, his eyes locked on hers as he thrust into her almost violently slapped into her head, and she felt the sensation again, every nerve ending firing. And he kept tracing that lip, as if he knew exactly what he was doing to her.

She opened her menu, and used it to hide her mouth. “I thought we were getting together to share information,” she said, and he laughed.

“Not just another excuse for me to make a series of plays to get your pants off?”

Her cheeks were flaring red again. “I mean. Not here? Public sex is not one of my kinks.”

And of course that was when the waiter showed up. Because she wasn’t actually blushing hard enough to light up the city yet.

The waiter at least didn’t say anything. “Good evening,” he said, “My name is James, and I’ll be taking care of you this evening. Can I get you started with something this evening?”

“I’m sorry,” Zoey said, and fumbled for the menu. “I’m not sure—do you have a shandy?”

James nodded. “Orange and lemon,”

“Orange, please,” she said. “That would be great.”

James turned towards Alex. “And for you sir? We have a variety of bottled beers.” He listed off several really cheap national beers, completely unaware—or uncaring—that Alex’s face was growing steadily more set. Zoey watched, a little surprised. She wasn’t completely naive, and she’d grown up in the South, she knew micro aggressions when she saw them, but she was used to them being—well, much more subtle. And not happening in front of her, for Christ’s sake.

“Sorry,” Alex interrupted. “Do you have anything locally brewed?” His intonation made it a question, but his eyes were far less quietly curious.

The waiter bristled. “Obviously,” he said.

“I was just curious,” Alex said, in that same level tone, his smile broad and friendly, “Because I wasn’t sure why you weren’t telling me about the chocolate raspberry stout that the
Times
reviewer raved about last month.”

“I thought—” The waiter said, and then his mouth snapped shut. His jaw worked for a moment, and then he found his smile again, though the edges had gotten decidedly more tight. “Would you care for a pint, sir?”

Alex nodded, utterly gracious. “That would be fantastic,” he said. “We’ll need another minute to look at the menus, I think.”

Zoey watched the waiter leave, and worked to keep her mouth from hanging open. Alex turned to his menu like nothing had happened. “I’m—” she fought for words for a moment. “I’m really sorry about that.”

He didn’t meet her eyes, didn’t even look up. “You aren’t the one who ought to be apologizing.”

“I’ve never—”

He did look up at her then, and there was a layer of pain in his eyes that she hadn’t been expecting. “I was hoping we’d get through at least a few dates before you’d have to witness something like that. I’d really rather not hash into it tonight, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay,” she said. And then her brain caught up to her ears. “A few dates? Are we on a date?” Was that her, making that high pitched squeaky sound? There was nothing good or graceful about that. At all. The way he was grinning wasn’t a great sign for her continued calm either.

“Food first,” he said. “And then talking. I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked up something of an appetite today.” His knees bumped hers under the table. Even that little bit of contact was electric. She forced her eyes down onto the menu and read the dozens of different kinds of burgers that were offered. She couldn’t make sense of half the words, not because they were fancy, just because she couldn’t stop thinking about his promise to lick her until she screamed.

In the end, she chose a bacon burger with swiss cheese and sauteed mushrooms; he picked a California burger with guacamole. She tried not to look at the prices; she was fairly sure they were going to give her palpitations if she thought about them too hard. Alex was scrupulously careful placing his order; he essentially made it so that the waiter didn’t have to ask any additional questions. Zoey, to compensate, took her sweet time, making him drag out of her how she wanted the burger cooked, what she wanted for a side, and what kind of fries she would prefer. Alex was grinning by the end; when the waiter left and she winked at him, he rolled his eyes.

“So you’re from the south,” he said.

She nodded. “Outside Covington, Louisiana.”

“How long have you been in the city?”

“Three years. Came to pursue the dream, found out dreams are expensive. What about you? You’ve lived in the city your whole life, haven’t you?”

“More or less,” he said. “My mother has a place upstate, and my father kept apartments in a couple different cities, but I grew up here. School in Connecticut, college in Boston. But New York, born and bred.”

“What do you do, when you’re not carousing, beating up willing women, or running multi-national corporations?”

“Carousing,” he said, laughing. “You are from the south, aren’t you?”

“And proud of it, sha,” she said, before she thought better of it.

“You’ve said that a few times,” he said. “It’s not something I’m familiar with. What does it mean?”

Goddamnit, if she blushed one more time, she was going to start wearing a surgeon’s mask to go out in public. “It’s kind of like dear, or sweetheart, most of the time. It comes from
cher
.”

He nodded. “That makes sense.” He took a bite of his burger, and she had to love the face he made. Pure, delighted pleasure at well cooked food. It was nice to know that someone could be a billionaire and still love burgers. He wiped some avocado off his lip, then met her eyes while he licked his fingertip clean. She reminded herself again that crawling into his lap would probably get them banned, and giving his reputation, she’d probably end up making an appearance in her own crappy paper. When the first reminder didn’t work, she reminded herself again, must more firmly. “I like to run,” he said. “I don’t get to run in the city as much as I want to, but I try to keep up on a treadmill enough that I don’t humiliate myself when I get the chance to run somewhere else. I have a secret passion for really bad science fiction movies, the kind they used to make the joke movies about, with the robots, and the janitor?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

“Don’t worry, I’ll show you some time.” He said it so casually. “I was a pain in the ass for a lot of years. And now that I’m less of a pain in the ass, the media seems determined to turn me into a pain in the ass, just so that people will keep clicking headlines about me. I haven’t trashed a hotel room or gotten thrown out of a club in five years, I’ll have you know.” He chewed for a moment, and took a long pull off his beer. “And what about you? Journalist, novelist, or poet?”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s three types of people who move to New York to make their living writing. My money’s on journalist; if you were a novelist or a poet, you’d be getting coffee for an editor somewhere, hoping he’d take a look at your manuscript sooner or later.”

“Guilty as charged,” she said.

“So what made a young Zoey Gardener look up and say, ‘I know, I want to pursue a career in a profession that’s slowly dying?”

She told herself that he didn’t mean to be rude and dismissive. He was probably trying for flip and goofy. Hitting him would be ridiculously out of line, no matter how tempting it felt in the moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “What made a not so young Alexander Blankenship decide to take over his philandering father’s company and keep selling the kind of weapons that are sooner or later going to kill all of us?”

She had probably gone way too far. It was too close to what she’d said this afternoon. To her surprise, though, he went still for a moment, then shrugged. “Touche,” he said continuing on his burger.

“Journalism isn’t dying,” she said. “It’s evolving. And I want to be part of the evolution. I want to help drive it towards its next great thing.”

“And you’re doing that at the
Downtown Voice
?”

“God, no. But they pay my rent—barely—and I do my time. Sooner or later, I’ll break something big, and I’ll be able to get the kind of attention I need to move up.”

“I don’t know, I thought your work on the guy who was jerking off in the faces of all those little old ladies on the subway was stellar.”

In an odd way, it felt like an apology. She decided to take it as one. For now, at least.

“And so this is where AEGIS comes in.”

She nodded. “I’m seeing some things that don’t add up. Like—”

He wasn’t paying any attention at all. His burger hung in slack fingers, and he was staring up at the TV that graced the bar behind her. She would have been mad if it had been some sort of sporting even on, but he was staring at the nightly news. “What’s the matter?”